Racket Ball

Not much time to talk tonight so I thought I'd leave you with an eye-opening Frankenchart I recently created which has absolutely nothing to do with the above cartoon.

I first went and found a chart showing the number of U.S. servicemen employed in previous years, in this case since 1960. I then overlaid it with a chart showing how much we have spent on the military (the red vertical bars). The data I had began in 1972, so there's an initial gap. (Click the image for a slightly larger version.)

As you can see there's a well defined correlation between size of the U.S. military and its operating budget right up until 2000 when it literally starts going off the chart. This massive increase in the military budget is not about how much we now spend on men and materiel, it's a clear indication of the vast amount of tax dollars being shoveled into the pockets of cronies and insiders.



General Smedley Butler said it best, way back in 1935, that "War is a racket."

And he was right.

=Lefty=